Leverage Season 3 Episode 11

The Rashomon Job

Recap

The episode opened with the team arguing over who stole the Aqu’abi Dagger from a Boston museum exhibit five years before. They all agreed to let Nate decided who stole the dagger as each laid out their versions of the story.

Grifter: Sophie ran a long con for four months with two different identities. She carefully assured that artwork that she donated from her “Duchess” persona would be mixed in with the dagger. She used her second persona of a lab tech to switch the shipping labels on the dagger’s file to have it sent to her London address. The only hitch in her plan was that the dagger did not arrive in the crate from the museum.

Hitter: Eliot owing a favor to a powerful man referred to as “Government” was contracted to break in and steal the dagger from the Boston museum at the same time that Sophie was there. Eliot posed as Dr. Wes Abernathy to get into the museum and worked his way to the loading dock where he took over as the shipment driver. When he opened the crate, the box for the dagger was there but only a coffee cup was inside.

Hacker: Hardison hacked in and took the invite of a foreign dignitary to get into the museum. He had his home computer run a brute force attack on the security system and when it was done he faked choking so he could get access to a computer terminal and changed the orders on the dagger to stay in the vault. Unfortunately for him when he went to the vault it was empty.

Thief: Parker posed as a waitress and snuck into through the ventilation system to the vault and removed the dagger before Hardison got to it. However as she was climbing out through the ventilation shaft to the roof she was caught by the head of security named Coswell and in the struggle to break free the dagger fell out of her belt and dropped down the air shaft

Mastermind: Nate, now having all the pieces put the story together from all of them was able to clarify some missing parts for the others. It seems that the curator of the museum was actually replacing items with fakes and selling the real one of the black market. The dagger all four of them were trying to steal was a fake. When the dagger dropped down the air shaft it landed with Nate who then realized it was a fake and confronted the museum curator.

In the end none of them had stolen the dagger and Nate used curator to take down the black market dealer who had been selling the real items stolen from the museum, a man known only as “Government."